Opportunistic Bandwidth Sharing for Virtual Network Mapping

Network virtualization has emerged as a powerful way to fend off the current ossification of the Internet. A major challenge is virtual network mapping, which is to assign substrate resources to Virtual Networks (VNs) such that some predefined constraints are satisfied and substrate resources are utilized in an effective and efficient manner. Due to the NP-completeness of this problem, a variety of heuristic algorithms have been proposed. However, existing solutions rarely consider the inefficient utilization of bandwidth resources due to the network traffic fluctuation. In this paper, the authors study the opportunistic bandwidth sharing in a single physical link among multiple virtual links from different VNs.